


i'll hold on through this time

by softvampiric



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Basically Basira and Jon were in a band once and also they both love and support Daisy, But considering my source material a surprisingly happy ending, Daisy is real Gay about Basira's voice, F/F, Mechanisms!Basira, Some angst, Tenderness, You don't need to have listened to the mechanisms though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22626526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softvampiric/pseuds/softvampiric
Summary: You mentioned having been in a band once, back when I hardly knew you. We were sitting in the car, I think, waiting for something to happen, though I can’t remember what. We were making small talk. Rain beading the glass of the windows. “I’ll have to come see you sometime,” I said, and you told me you’d been broken up for a while now. You’d joined the police and someone else had gotten some high-stress position at the Magnus Institute and you just hadn’t had time anymore.“We did go out with a bang, though,” you said, that wry smile on your full, pretty mouth. I remember that I noticed that about you from the start. But when the thing we had been waiting for happened it all slipped away. We sprang into action. We gave chase. Sometimes it felt like that was my real life, the chase. Everything else was just an intermission, full of dreamy distractions that washed away like blood in water when the call rang out, sharp and clear, in my mind.Everything, it seems, but you and your songs.A series of vignettes regarding love and blood and song.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	i'll hold on through this time

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Ragnarok V, by The Mechanisms.
> 
> This fic contains referenced police brutality and self-harm adjacent ideation. 
> 
> Also, a disclaimer: I am very much an American and didn't do any research on England for this, so please excuse any glaring cultural idiosyncrasies :) 
> 
> Enjoy!

You mentioned having been in a band once, back when I hardly knew you. We were sitting in the car, I think, waiting for something to happen, though I can’t remember what. We were making small talk. Rain beading the glass of the windows. “I’ll have to come see you sometime,” I said, and you told me you’d been broken up for a while now. You’d joined the police and someone else had gotten some high-stress position at the Magnus Institute and you just hadn’t had time anymore. 

“We did go out with a bang, though,” you said, that wry smile on your full, pretty mouth. I remember that I noticed that about you from the start. But when the thing we had been waiting for happened it all slipped away. We sprang into action. We gave chase. Sometimes it felt like that was my real life, the chase. Everything else was just an intermission, full of dreamy distractions that washed away like blood in water when the call rang out, sharp and clear, in my mind. 

You were a good distraction. I discovered that the first time you kissed me, when it felt like you were pulling me down to earth. My feet on the ground, your hands around my waist. There was an undeniable rightness to it. A rightness to you, even when you weren’t touching me. I liked the way your eyes moved slowly over my face, the way you walked with a purpose. The way you sang to yourself sometimes, low and soft. I remembered the band. I felt a little bad for never having listened to it.

I know I wasn’t very good at whatever it was we were. What were we? Sometimes your legs were draped over mine on the sofa. Sometimes we were back to back, guns drawn, and I knew you’d sense any twitch of my muscles and move to exactly where I needed you. Sometimes I was alone in the early morning with a dead-not human on the bloodied ground in front of me. Sometimes I didn’t need to sleep for days, though I usually managed it on the nights we were together. When I wasn’t on the hunt. You were my steady axis to turn around, but I’d never taken you out to dinner. Never listened to you play the guitar that sat in the corner of your bedroom. I wondered if you wished I was a normal girlfriend, one who picked you up for drinks after work and never disappeared for weeks at a time. But you seemed to accept things the way they were. I think you knew what I was, even then. I saw the icicle sharpness behind your eyes when you were on a case, that drive to know and know and know. Sometimes it seemed you were just as obsessive as I was. 

I sat down one evening and looked up your band. Youtube videos. A stage, a crowd, surprisingly big. You, in a pink scarf, a loose grey button-down, and sturdy boots, looking every inch the space pirate. That guitar in your hands- you played with a casual, practiced ease. Dark, glittering eyes, surveying the people before you. That smile. 

You started to sing. 

“I listened to The Mechanisms.” 

That was the first thing I said when I saw you at work the next day, before you’d even finished saying hello to me. It seemed to surprise you. “Ah,” you said, with a laugh, “I see you’ve discovered my steampunk college days. What did you listen to?”

“All of it.” 

“Oh!” You smiled. “So you liked it, then?” 

“Yes,” I breathed. 

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Your eyes were still on me, and there was a curious tilt to your head, like you were waiting for me to elaborate. I wanted to tell you exactly how I felt about what I’d seen, but I wasn’t even sure of it myself. It was you, standing up there, your fingers dancing along the strings of your instrument. The dark shimmer across your eyelids and cheekbones as you closed your eyes and sang. It was your voice, so warm and smooth and lovely, so intense that when you sang out loud the whole room seemed to hold its breath. And it was the stories you told. Big, grand, sweeping, tragic stories, and I’ve always loved a good story. Ones where people were small, and they died, but before they died they mattered. Where every beat had its place. Where sometimes you had to take a little bit of monster into yourself, if it meant keeping others safe. 

I didn’t know how to say any of this, so I instead I told you that you made a surprisingly good mobster, and you laughed. “Don’t tell my boss.” And that was it. 

I was expecting your weirdo college friend frontman archivist to put up more of a fight when I caught him taking tea with a monster. But he didn’t pull out a shotgun and start cackling. He just stammered and pleaded at me. Still, I knew what he was. What he could do. He needed to die for it. My vision narrowed in on his pulsing heartbeat, and I barely noticed his gasping and squirming as I pressed the knife to his skin. I would cut a line through his lying throat and things would be a little more right in the world. One less monster. 

I didn’t even see you until you called out my name. But there you were, your mouth set in a cold line. I didn’t like you being there. The things I did there were private, me alone with my prey. Somehow it was jarring to see your face, surrounded by dark trees and bare, scorched, bloodstained earth.

You told me to put him down. 

Something inside me really, really didn’t want to listen. I argued with you. He needed to be dead. I needed to make him die so that he wouldn’t be dangerous anymore. I protested. “You don’t know what he is. You don’t know what it’s like to have your secrets pulled out like teeth, just because he asked. He’s not a person. Come on, Basira, you’ve seen him doing all sorts of creepy shit, summoning monsters and chanting...” 

“What?” gasped the Archivist. “I didn’t-”

“Shut up,” I growled. 

“Daisy,” you said, calm and slow, “You know that was just an act. For god’s sake, look at him.” 

He looked scared. Less like a murderer than I would have expected. Not that I trusted him. But you had said my name, held it gently but firmly with your voice, and I knew you shouldn’t watch me do this. You might get upset. And if you saw everything I did and it upset you, angered you, disgusted you- well, that would be harder to ignore than my own moral qualms. 

I dropped the Archivist. He gasped, scrambling backwards. “Is this about the Mechanisms? How-” 

“Not the time, Jon,” you said. Small, tight-lipped smile. You turn to me. “You reckon he can mind control people. Make them tell the truth? Why not try it on Elias?” 

_ Somewhere deep inside me fester memories and dreams _

I walked up and down the corridor outside your room. Your closet with a cot in it. You were sat on the bed, reading a book, with your eyes occasionally flicking up to me as I passed. Our little sanctuary, you had called this room, though bitterly. But you were wrong. If I sat in there for too long blood started dripping down the walls, pulsing out of the pores of the bricks and pooling around my feet. Not that it was different than any other room. 

_ I try to pin them down but I can't hear beyond the screams _

Reading didn’t help, when I got like this. My eyes slipped and skidded over the sentences, and the story was lost. Pacing back and forth, up and down; that helped a little, letting me know that I was real, that I was in control of my own limbs again. Though if I walked too fast, I started feeling the urge to run sprint chase spring catch tear. To hunt. Was that all I had now? Was my only choice between being trapped or being the hunter? 

_ Deep inside my mind  _

_ What is there to find?  _

There was something horrible pulsing in my blood. It had its teeth in my brain stem, its claws intertwined with my ribs. Sleeping now, maybe. But I knew it was there, and it made my skin itch and crawl with terror and revulsion. Sometimes I stared at myself in the dull mirror in the Magnus Institute’s bathroom and wondered if I could cut into my own chest and tear it out of myself. Maybe it was clutching me so tightly that I wouldn’t remember how to live without it. Maybe its removal would pull the parts of me it gripped out too, leaving gaping, bleeding gaps too big to survive. 

Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. 

_ Flashes like camera bulbs fire in my brain  _

_ Is this truly me, am I going insane? _

I stayed with Jon when you were busy. He understood, let me sit with my headphones in as he sorted papers or read statements. We didn’t always talk all that much. We didn’t need to. He was just as wrong, just as broken as I was. We sat together and pretended to be humans. He murmured into his tape recorder. I closed my eyes and listened to the music. 

_ In faint bloody flashes I watch people die  _

_ And if that was me, then who am I? _

“What are you listening to?” he asked me once, placing a cup of hot tea on the desk in front of me. 

“You,” I told him.

“Um, what-” he stammered. 

“Your old band.” I held up my phone for him to see the song title. “You aren’t even in this one that much.” 

“Loki.” His eyes fell on mine, dark and serious and knowing . It used to creep me out when he did that, but I didn’t mind so much anymore. Those eyes had found me in the dark and the choke. That was a lot less monstrous than plenty of things I’d done. 

“Been listening to it on repeat,” I said. 

“And does it help?” he asked, gently. I could feel the soft tug of his question on my mind.

“I think so,” I said, not resisting it. “The song makes me feel… understood, maybe. And it’s nice to have the voices with me. Basira. You.” 

“Even me.” He chuckled. 

“Don’t get cocky, Basira’s a better singer than you,” I said, but I said it with a smile. He understood. 

I think you didn’t understand as well as Jon, not at first. You were happy to see me, of course. That was obvious in how you’d clung to me when you first saw me, how you hadn’t even thought to stop the tears from slipping down your cheeks. How every night after that you fell asleep gripping my hand. But I was a different person than the woman you’d lost; I was weaker, thinner, more afraid, and I walked the hallway for hours with my hands curled tight together, and I closed my eyes tight when blood started dripping from the walls, and I couldn’t protect you or anyone else anymore. 

You needed a partner. You needed someone steady, someone you could count on. You had always been able to put aside your feelings and fears and follow the trail that logic laid out, and I admired that about you. But that evening, as you watched me pace, I knew a part of you must be calculating my usefulness and finding me lacking. 

You set down your book, stood up, and walked to the door of the room. You looked out into the corridor and said my name. I breathed in deep, trying to pull indigo quiet into my lungs. I didn’t want you to see me trembling. 

“Yes?” I said as I turned to face you. 

“How are you feeling?” you asked.

“I’m just restless,” I said. “Trying to relax, you know. Listening to the quiet.” 

You nodded. There was a slight tilt to your head as you looked at me for a moment, and then you said, “I want to try something. Come in here with me?” 

So I followed you into the little grey room, to the two cots pushed together with the bright quilts and pillows you’d brought from home. You sat down, and gestured for me to join you. I sat next to you, but you gently pushed me down so that I was lying with my head resting on your legs. That was good. You were soft, and even down there in the dusty tunnels you smelled nice, familiar, like rose hand lotion and coffee and something else indescribably you. I felt your hand stroke gently over my shoulder, then up and down my arm. I heard you take a breath and for a moment thought you were going to say something. But then you started to sing. 

You barely got two words out before I sat bolt upright. “Basira-”

“What is it?” 

“I- What are you doing?” 

“Singing. You might have heard of it?” Your mouth twitched upwards, but your gaze was solemn and steady in a way that made me want to run and hide at the same time as it made me want to bury my face in your shoulder. “Jon told me you’d been listening to The Mechanisms, and I thought maybe you’d like to hear it in person,” you said. “I don’t have to do it if you’d rather not.” 

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “I’d like to hear you sing, I just- you don’t have to do this. I know you have… research and things to do.” 

“Sure,” you said. Your eyes were still on mine. “But I want to.” 

“Okay.” I flopped back down into your lap. Abruptly, perhaps; you laughed softly. I looked up at you as you rested your hand on my shoulder. You sang to me. 

I don’t even remember what the words were. You would sing me many songs down in that little room once it became our ritual. The Mechanisms, sometimes:  _ come my way and stay my honey  _ and  _ we’re nothing but our shackles  _ and  _ I swear that I’ll not lose you again  _ (and you’d always look at me in a certain way that made my heart seem to expand in my chest when you sang that line) and other things too; songs we’d listened to over the radio in our patrol car, or melodies that had caught your interest recently. The words weren’t altogether that important. It was-

I thought I’d known what it sounded like when you sang. I thought I’d known what it looked like. But lying with you in our grey room, with your gentle voice curling warmly around me- that was something different. An ache started up underneath my sternum as the song filled my lungs. I stared up at you. 

I used to think the most beautiful thing in the world was the chase. But your lips were parted, and your eyes fluttered almost closed as you breathed in deep and sang softly out. Your hand stroked gently down my arm, across my too-thin ribs, as if there was nothing under my skin but blood and muscle and bone. And I knew in that instant that I’d never seen anything as beautiful. 

When you finished your song you opened your eyes and looked down at me, almost shyly. “How are you feeling?” you started to say, though you’d barely finished your sentence when I sat up and caught your face in my hands and pressed my mouth to yours, insistent enough that I felt your breath stutter against me. 

“That was… that was lovely,” I mumbled. You are lovely, I wanted to say. You are the steady light at the center of me, you are the binding force that keeps me from flying into pieces. You are the song I sing to myself when I’m lost and blinded. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything.” And maybe that was enough.   
Your eyes were soft as you reached out to me. Your thumb brushed along my jaw as you curled your hand behind my neck, holding me in place, only it felt the opposite of being buried. “Of course,” you said. Just that. And you kissed me, slow and soft and warm, and for a moment everything was good. 

I knew it couldn’t last, even then. One heart’s blood can’t sustain a broken world forever; soon enough it would drip away, and that would be the end. So through those weeks I clung tightly to each word from your mouth, each song, each subtle smile, each desperate kiss. Each night that I held you in my arms contained a silent whisper of goodbye. 

There was a time when you held me and sang to me. That time is over. Now it is fear and chase and kill. Except-

Except you’re singing again. 

Except you’re standing before me in a dark alleyway, and there’s blood on my hands. Your jacket is stained dark, and you’re holding a gun. A man  stands behind you. His eyes are wrong, like the swirling, staring sky. I think I need to kill him. He’s afraid, and you’re afraid, except the fear is wrong, because you’re stepping towards me, and you’re singing. And your voice is cracked, choked, broken. 

_ Why back away? This time I'll stay _

_ Come stand at my side as we make them pay _

_ I look in your eyes, there’s nothing behind _

_ What did they do, did they take your mind? _

And a thousand memories are flashing through me. And they hurt. And I groan and growl, and fear rises in your eyes, but you still don’t back away, because it’s not me that you’re afraid of. 

“You used to like that one,” you say. “The singing helped you to be there with me.” And you take another step forward. “Please, Daisy.”

Daisy. Daisy who was me, before I was claws teeth pain. Daisy who lay down with you and listened to the words in the quiet. But now there’s too much noise, and I desperately need to make it stop-

“Daisy,” says the man. “Tell me what you see.”

“Two watchers,” I say. “Scared.” But that’s not all. I’ve crawled with him through mud and pain, so I must know who he is. “Jon,” I tell the man, and he nods.

“And her?”

Blood on my hands. Tears in your eyes. You take another step forward. You aren’t supposed to do that. You’re supposed to run. I’ll make you afraid. I’ll make you bleed. But- 

_ “Rescue in vain, choke down my pain” _

But your touch is gentle on my hands, and I feel something tear inside me. 

Your voice is so quiet.  _ “I swear that I'll not lose you again.” _

“Basira,” I say, and I fall to my knees. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The first song I quote is Loki, by The Mechanisms. The second is Sigyn, also by The Mechanisms, surprisingly enough. If you like The Magnus Archives I would absolutely recommend them, 10/10 for tragic, feral, and gay.
> 
> This is my first TMA work so far, but I anticipate more coming in the near future! Right now I have some Penumbra Podcast stuff up if you want to check that out. I'm also on Tumblr @softestsky.
> 
> Have a lovely day!


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